Notes from Underground: On the Ground in Guernica

Writer
and former radical bookstore owner Sean Stewart talks about his new
book on the underground press that was so vital to ’60s counterculture.

With the Occupy Wall Street protests still fresh in the nation’s collective memory, and hacktivist groups such as Anonymous and LulzSec now a part of our culture, modern American protest has a different identity than the counterculture movements of the 1960s.

One shared trait,
however, is the importance these movements have placed on mass
communication. In the case of OWS, social media played a critical role,
facilitating instantaneous eyewitness reports from Liberty
Plaza/Zuccotti Park and providing the tools to quickly organize. But old
media models had their place. OR Books’ Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action that Changed America and n+1’s Occupy! An OWS-Inspired Gazette,
are key examples. Taking cues from the Sixties underground press,
these publications offered readers a more holistic view than social
media could provide, and tipped their hats to a publishing movement
that often remains historically unsung.

Of course, no discussion
of American counterculture in the 1960s is complete without mentioning
the role and influence of the underground press. In the wake of the
civil rights movement, and as public opposition to the war in Vietnam
swelled, this ad hoc network of the alternative newspapers found a
growing audience among the disaffected and disenfranchised.

What
set these small, independent weeklies apart from the journalistic
establishment was that they didn’t cover news in the same fashion as The New York Times, Boston Globe, or Chicago Tribune.
Instead, the loose-knit group of editors, writers, photographers, and
illustrators that comprised the underground press focused heavily on
the concerns of the rising New Left, the far left, and the infinite
nuances of the counterculture scenes sprouting up from Haight-Ashbury
to the East Village, and every small town in-between. In essence, the
underground press represented the freaks, a mandate lovingly embraced by
the movement’s founders.

In On the Ground: An Illustrated Anecdotal History of the Sixties Underground Press in the U.S.
(PM Press), editor Sean Stewart—who until 2009 operated Babylon
Falling, a San Francisco bookstore and gallery space that was a forum
for revolutionary literature and progressive visual art—delves into the
origins, aspirations, and internal politics of America’s radical
alternative news scene. Imagine artwork by R. Crumb, Bill Narum, and
Rick Griffin; a column by Charles Bukowski; reporting from Ray Mungo and
Allen Young; that was the tenor of the underground press.

“The
underground press was part of a vast and amorphous scene,” Stewart
writes in the book’s introduction, “any attempt on my part to be
comprehensive would have been folly.” Nonetheless, Stewart has assembled
a primer that dives deep into the psyche of American counterculture.
“For me, the relatability of the era lies in the humor, irreverence, and
open defiance to authority,” Stewart tells me. “But the most important
legacy is that regular people from all walks of life stood up and
demanded to be counted and to be heard.”

The social, cultural, and political turbulence chronicled by such off-radar newspapers as Rat Subterranean News, Screw, San Francisco Oracle, East Village Other, Black Mask, and Los Angeles Free Press,
to name only a few, is commonly overlooked in mainstream histories. As
a result, what often remains is the same scattershot of familiar
imagery from the late 1960s/early 1970s that’s lingered in the nation’s
collective memory: hippies dancing with flowers in their hair at the
Monterey Pop Festival during the Summer of Love; Timothy Leary at the
Human Be-In at Golden Gate Park in 1967, urging the Haight-Ashbury
crowds to “Turn on, tune in, drop out”; U.S. military tanks on city
streets during the race riots in Detroit and Newark; the rise of the
Hell’s Angels as the new American outlaws; and the Kent State University
shootings and Mary Ann Vecchio’s haunting scream.

What makes On the Ground
resonate, aside from its interviews, are the visuals culled from
Stewart’s extensive private collection of underground newspapers. Given
the increasing scarcity of the print material from that era, On the Ground depicts the movement’s aesthetics and anti-authoritarian bent in a way that oral histories fall short.

For
Stewart, who first got introduced to radical literature through
hip-hop—via references by Tupac, BDP, and the Beastie Boys, among
others—documenting American counterculture has become a natural
extension of his prior work as a bookseller and curator. Babylon Falling,
his shuttered bookstore and gallery space in San Francisco, is now a
blog dedicated to cataloging the revolutionary publications and ephemera
from the Sixties and Seventies, with a running thread on hip-hop
culture. Over the last several months, I’ve corresponded with Stewart by
email, discussing his book, the historical significance of the
underground press, and what modern-day protest looks like. It turns out
that the names may be different, but the struggles remain eerily
familiar.

Guernica:
Many of the visuals in the book are pulled from your own collection.
Have these publications become increasingly hard to find in the
fifty-some years since their initial release?

Sean Stewart:
Because they are starting to pop up at estate sales, there are
actually more available now. Of course I also pick up papers once in a
while on eBay, but prices are criminally inflated online, so those come
in one-by-one in a trickle. I don’t want to snitch on myself too much,
but the most fruitful hustle for me is taking trips deep into New
Jersey.

Guernica: In the book, you talk with a
cross section of people who were involved in the production and
distribution of underground publications such as the Berkeley Barb, Chicago Seed, Helix, Los Angeles Free Press, The East Village Other, Screw: The Sex Review, and The Black Panther,
among others. During your interviews, did any specific conversation
help you better understand the social and political tone of that time
period?

Sean Stewart: If I had to single out just one, it would be my conversation with Alice Embree of the Austin paper, The Rag.
She helped me to get a deeper understanding of just how insidious the
male chauvinism in the movement was and why the emergence of Women’s
Liberation, and its manifestation in the underground press, was
inevitable.

… we’re all familiar with the cases of
overt oppression that existed, but it’s much harder to identify or even
articulate the nature of the oppression that is hardwired into the
culture.

Guernica: Did Alice Embree give any specific examples of the type of male chauvinism that was dominant in the movement?

Sean Stewart:
Definitely, but it wasn’t so much the particular abuses, or that she
was trying to harangue me about male chauvinism, it was just something
in the way she related them that hit me. We’re sitting in her living
room and she’s telling me stories illustrating just how much of a badass
she was and yet she still, reflexively, fell into the role of typist
in the early days at The Rag. Of course, we’re all familiar
with the cases of overt oppression that existed, but it’s much harder
to identify or even articulate the nature of the oppression that is
hardwired into the culture—the sort of thing that flows quietly beneath
the surface, assumptions and attitudes that we accumulate little by
little over the years. I don’t know, it just made sense to me the way
she told it.

Guernica: Were any mainstream
newspapers or magazines getting the counterculture coverage right? And
do you think the underground press caused traditional media outlets to
feel threatened?

Sean Stewart: For the Sixties, you can’t get me to go more mainstream than Ramparts magazine.

I
tread carefully here because the concept of “getting it right” rests
on a lot of assumptions. For my part, I’m not so concerned with facts
as I am with truth. And I think reading the underground press purely in
the pursuit of facts would be folly, but it was one of the few places
where you could get a true representation of the culture as it was
being experienced. Hunter S. Thompson has a great quote about the blind
spots inherent in any posture of objectivity, and I tend to agree with
the Gonzo approach as it applies to truth and facts.

That being
said, things are so bad with the media right now that you really can
look back on the mainstream press of the Sixties and Seventies and
imagine that they were radical. I’m even willing to concede that great
journalism was done back then, but if you follow the thread to the
mid-Sixties you begin to realize that the mainstream media was
essentially embarrassed into sympathetic coverage of the anti-war
movement and forced to occasionally train a skeptical eye on government
corruption.

The youth movement exploded right under their noses,
and while they served up bullshit pro-war pieces and condescending
articles about the counterculture, the underground press was right
there, on the ground, reporting the shit as they lived it. I don’t want
to overstate the case, but I’m sure the mainstream press felt
threatened. I doubt that the tone of their coverage would have ever
changed if they didn’t sense an existential threat.

Guernica:
The underground press is historically significant for a lot of
reasons, but one aspect that comes to mind is this idea of activist
journalism. I can’t remember who said it in the book, but one of the
interview subjects talked about how he went from being an observer to a
reporter to a warrior. Was this experience typical for many who were
involved?

Sean Stewart: I think it was. It was a
culture of authenticity that demanded full involvement, and so people
working at the papers were evolving at the same pace and in the same
direction as the movement.

Guernica: You were
born in 1979, more than a decade after the formative years of America’s
underground press. Since you didn’t live through the social and
political turbulence of that era, what initially sparked your interest
in the subject matter covered in your book?

Sean Stewart: It’s definitely been a gradual process over the years. If I had to map it, I would start with my Mad
magazine obsession as a kid. Later on, as a teenager, listening to
hip-hop provided the first exposure to this stuff. A lot of the artists I
was listening to planted the seed for ideas and names that I would
encounter later: Tupac talking about his [Black] Panther heritage; the
Robert Williams artwork on the cover of BDP’s Sex and Violence
album; all the Sixties and Seventies soul, funk, and jazz that hip-hop
producers were sampling from their parents’ record collections.

I
was living in Jamaica, so this stuff was beyond scarce. I treasured
everything I could get my hands on, so there was really nothing escaping
me—every little lyric and aspect of the music, every detail of the
artwork. I even got put on to Vaughn Bode from an Ad Rock lyric on “Sure
Shot,” and then searching out Bode stuff is what put the East Village Other
on my radar. Basically, these ideas were floating around in my sphere
as a kid, and I think I was primed to be receptive to the papers once I
started coming across them.

A lot of what is
standard practice visually in magazines and newspapers today was
pioneered by the kids working on these underground newspapers in the
Sixties.

Guernica: I want to stray for a moment to talk about the visual aesthetics of the movement. In the book, Ben Morea—one of the men behind Black Mask—talks
about how they treated each cover of the magazine as a piece of art.
How important were visuals in attracting attention and gaining an
audience?

Sean Stewart: The visuals were
indispensable. They were the first point of entry for many people, and,
in contrast to the linear, text-heavy layout of the straight press, the
focus on graphics and rejection of standard principles of layout in
the underground acted as an instant, and very potent, signifier of the
differences between the two. A lot of what is standard practice
visually in magazines and newspapers today was pioneered by the kids
working on these underground newspapers in the Sixties. Shit, I even
remember the uproar caused by the New York Times’ decision to finally include color photos back in the 1990s.

Guernica:
Do you think the freedom from having to appeal to a large, mainstream
audience fueled those in the underground press to try new things with
layout, design, and content? Or was some other factor at play?

Sean Stewart:
The underground press, at its height, was reaching millions of people
worldwide, so I don’t think that having to appeal to a large,
mainstream audience necessitates the creation of boring content,
layout, or design. I think the sort of blandness you’re talking about
was, and is, an expression of a dying culture. By that same token, I
think that the underground press looked like it did because it was a
reflection of a vibrant youth culture. Also, from a technical
standpoint, the photo offset process by which most underground
newspapers were printed allowed for a certain degree of graphic
experimentation—if you were in the correct frame of mind.

Guernica:
Though it’s not exclusive to youth culture, the Occupy movement shares
a certain kinship with the underground press. What’s your impression
of the group’s messaging and political effectiveness?

I
think the establishment is asking the wrong questions. There seems to
be complete signal loss. No matter how you feel about the whole thing,
what can’t be denied is that millions of people feel betrayed. The
people held up their end of the bargain and rightly feel that they got
sold out.

Sean Stewart: I love how
Twitter is being used for real-time updates at protests and marches, I
love all the madness churned out over on Tumblr, all the livestreams
are great, and it’s always dope to see people reading the Occupied Wall Street Journals
out in the street. I love what Occuprint is doing and how they were
funded through Kickstarter. And, of course, I love all the handmade
cardboard signs—probably most emblematic of the spirit of the movement.

In
the graphics, and in the general atmosphere at the various rallies and
assemblies, I see the same sort of playfulness that was so important
to the Sixties underground press and which, a hundred years ago, made
the Wobblies so popular. Judy Gumbo Albert had a great little piece
over at Thorne Dreyer’s Rag Blog
where she breaks down the echoes of the Sixties she saw in the makeup
of the crowd at the big Oakland General Strike back in November. Of
course, although Occupy bears the mark of previous eras of struggle,
it’s also its own thing entirely. As Judy says in the article, “history
is not a straight line,” but I do think that in this case it is one
that is unbroken, and one that is distinctly American.

As far as
political effectiveness? Any intellectual differences I have instantly
melt away once I’m surrounded by thousands of people demanding a better
world. For me, the most vital part of the movement is the lack of
shame—the fact that people who are surrounded by an obscene abundance,
and yet have nothing, aren’t afraid to speak up.

And as far as the
overall discourse, I think the establishment is asking the wrong
questions. There seems to be complete signal loss. No matter how you
feel about the whole thing, what can’t be denied is that millions of
people feel betrayed. The people held up their end of the bargain and
rightly feel that they got sold out. As I see it, the system is a game
of three card monte. If you’re not the dealer, ringer, booster, or
lookout, you’re probably getting conned. The problem the conmen are now
facing is that the crowd is hip to the game. The key for the Occupy
movement will be making sure that the ringers in the crowd aren’t
speaking on their behalf as they try to redress grievances.

Guernica:
In one of the book’s final chapters, “People Burn Out, and People
Burned Out,” you cite the repression of the Nixon years and the
increasingly splintered focus of the underground press as contributing
to the movement’s eventual downfall. Even though its dominance faded,
what do you view as the most important aspect of the movement’s legacy?

Sean Stewart:
For me, the relatability of the era lies in the humor, irreverence,
and open defiance to authority, but I think the most important legacy
of the era is just the fact that regular people from all walks of life
(every color, every stripe, every persuasion) stood up and demanded to
be counted and to be heard. For the underground press, it started as a
system of intramural communication, and grew to become the unifying
institution for a counterculture made up of a wide range of affinity
groups.

About a month ago I was at Spectacle Theater in Brooklyn where they were screening Roz Payne’s classic newsreel film Garbage followed by Chris Marker’s The Sixth Side of the Pentagon,
which features footage of a group led by Ben Morea breaking through
the doors of the Pentagon at the massive 1967 anti-war rally in
Washington D.C.

Anyway, Ben Morea was there at the theater, and,
at the urging of the guys running the place, he took questions from the
crowd. A lot of the questions were of the “What should we do?” and,
“What mistakes did you make?” variety, and Ben’s answer was basically
that there is no blueprint, and that each person and each group needs
to decide for itself what is to be done. He has a line at the end of
the book that I think applies to the underground press and that speaks
to the legacy of the Sixties youth movement in general: “That’s the
lesson of the Sixties; everybody was out there. It wasn’t just the
crazies, like we’ve been called. It wasn’t just us, it was everybody.
It was all there, and I think that’s the key: it takes it all.”